Add K for Kensington Market to LRBR for Le Restaurant Bistro et Rotisserie, and you get G for Gentrification. For years, Kensington’s cluttered streets — the vintage clothes stores, exotic food markets, European butchers and La Palette, where horsemeat was sold openly — epitomized the anti-Toronto, a funky refuge from encroaching suburbanization or, as Shaw’s dustbin man Alfred Doolittle put it in Pygmalion, “middle-class morality.” The city was proud of this piece of tourist gold, proof of a vibrant multicultural mix, the stamping ground for the late Al Waxman as King of Kensington, the small shopkeeper who held diversity together.

No sooner did Al leave than Kensington began to buckle. Once an indispensable source for ingredients hard to find elsewhere, today gourmet frenzy has seized the city. Local’s the buzz, artisan the mantra, boutiques such as Hooked and The Healthy Butcher are the rage. And the barbarians — international chains — are at the gate. Crunch came with Starbucks on College.

The last shoe dropped with La Palette’s departure for Queen West. A gaping hole was left in Augusta’s nascent food strip, anchored by Wanda’s Pie in the Sky and Torito, the Mexican tapas place. Filling the gap is a chic storefront. Le Restaurant Bistro et Rotisserie has spiffy French doors opening on to a patio to come. La Palette was a bit dinge while LRBR is smart white trim on pinkly terracotta walls with 38 seats. To set the seal on gentrification, the owners are Sylvain Brissonet and Jean-Charles Dupoire. A couple of years ago, they opened Loire on Harbord, a short bike ride away.

If anyone can channel Al Waxman’s big-hearted personality, it’s going to be Brissonet. He ranks alongside Peter Geary of Pangaea and Casey Bee of Sidecar as a blue-ribbon person whisperer. He bustles around customers engagingly. We’re hardly seated before going along with his suggestion that we order fresh foie gras ($19), which chef Dupoire sears so well. But first, the mineral shot of Miramichi oysters ($3 per), the perfect beginning to any meal. A glass of rose-tinged pinot gris ($10), from Ontario’s Organized Crime, but of course. One place where there’s no such thing as too much order — a comfortable restaurant.

The menu changes daily on the blackboard. In addition, there’s a charcuterie menu, and the offer of a rotisserie chicken ($32 whole, $16 half), with frites, to be eaten here or taken away. As we scoop the jus from the sweetly garnished foie gras, and have a sip of the plum-flavoured unfermented chardonnay that shows up at our elbows, we survey our future options. On my own, I’d go for steak frites, but who can go wrong with this gastro icon? Skate wing meunière ($20) is tempting. The boned skate is splayed over the plate, garnished with the tiniest croutons and sautéed potatoes. My companion loves it. I am a little cooler. I miss the old way — skate with black butter and capers, a treatment that strips the flesh from the cartilege in fat chewy ribbons — a unique fin.

Seared sweetbreads ($21) also get an update, rather less successfully than the skate. I forget to ask whether they are the thymus gland, which guards against infection, or the pancreas, which secretes enzymes that enable digestion. Whatever, I eat my medicine, little blobs with pleasing marshmallow-like consistency, bouncing back at the prod of a fork, but why are they dotted around the plate’s edge, upstaged by peapods? We end with an astringent lemon slice and cinnamon chantilly ($9). Cherry clafoutis is a classic ($10), but the cherries aren’t sour enough. Ice cream is über-vanilla, nonpareil.

But I haven’t come to a neighbourhood bistro to parse only the cooking — I’ve come to relax, in the spirit of dropping in on the local pub. Sure it’s great when the food is good, as it is here, but a bistro’s essential job is acculturation, creating an atmosphere that always welcomes you for a beer and sausage, thereby extending the gourmandise network, which is the tilth for great restaurants.